Two adults were arrested after a fight broke out during Randallstown High School's graduation ceremonies at Towson University's SECU Arena on Monday.
By Nayana Davis and Liz Bowie
1:36 p.m. EDT, May 28, 2014The Baltimore Sun

Two people were arrested in connection with a large fight that broke out outside a Baltimore County high school graduation Monday.

The violence erupted after the ceremony about 12:30 p.m. outside Towson University's SECU Arena, where the event took place, according to the college's police department.

[BTW, a BS reader commented that when school officials made the change form graduations at school to Towson, while they asserted that the reason was to sufficiently accommodate family members, the real reason was security.]

Dante Smith, 23, of the 2300 block of Tucker Lane in Woodlawn faces charges of assault and resisting arrest, police said. Natanya Johnson, 33, of the 3400 block of Retlaw Road in Gwynn Oak was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct.

Both adults were attendees at the graduation ceremony, said Charles Herring, deputy chief of the Towson University Police Department. The county schools are working with police as they investigate the incident. If students are found to have been involved in the incident, school officials will take disciplinary action against them, according to Mychael Dickerson, a school spokesman.

Video of the fight posted on YouTube shows two women exchanging blows before a group of men descend on them and join in on the fight.

Herring said no one was hospitalized after the scuffle.

The cause of the fight remains under investigation, police said.

"Randallstown High School's graduation was a celebration for the hundreds of students who are at the end of their high school careers," Dickerson said. "The altercation that happened outside the graduation ceremony yesterday was an unfortunate distraction from the graduates and their family members who came to honor and support their accomplishments."

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A federal judge has sentenced an ex-Marine to death for the 2009 murder of a Navy sailor at a barracks in northern Virginia.

Jorge Torrez of Zion, Illinois, was formally sentenced Friday afternoon in Alexandria, where last month he was convicted of murdering Amanda Snell at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. Following the jury's verdict, the law gave Judge Liam O'Grady no choice but to sentence Torrez to death.

Torrez's lawyers say he will appeal.

After Torrez was convicted of Snell's murder, he ordered his attorneys to make no arguments on his behalf during the trial's sentencing phase.

The jury also found Torrez responsible for killing two girls in his hometown of Zion in 2005. [This conflicts with other reports that say Torrez has yet to stand trial for the other murders, or else the jury exceeded its mandate.]

Note that Michaela Morales’ leftwing comrades at the scene all lied on her behalf, and that the MSM “reporting” was completely biased in her favor. Thank goodness for the video, or Preacher Don McGlone would have wound up in prison. But even with the video, there was no punishment for Michaela Morales, and thus no justice for Don McGlone.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Witnesses said a religious demonstrator incited an all-out riot in the middle of the MTSU campus. In the conflict, Michaela Morales claims she was sexually assaulted, and she was the one arrested.

Morales, a junior at MTSU, insists she was merely trying to break-up a fight when she wound-up tangling with a man named Don McGlone - an evangelist, turned antagonist, according to witnesses.

"It was getting scary," said eyewitness and Morales's boyfriend George Vasquez. "He was being very offensive to everybody."
On the section of campus known as the Knoll, eyewitnesses said Don McGlone was not preaching and much as he was reaching.

"He called me a homo man, a sissy and a faggot," said MTSU student and eyewitness Zak Craft.

Morales, a 23-year-old student from Bethpage, was arrested and charged by campus police.

"From what we saw, we felt that she crossed the line," said Lt. Jim Fanguy, MTSU police department. "She was making comments that she was being inappropriately touched. However, the video showed otherwise."

Investigators said cell phone video of the scuffle shows Morales shoving the preacher man, who toppled from his makeshift platform.

"In all reality, I'm not a volatile person. I don't result to violence, but it was ridiculous," said Morales. "I didn't do anything wrong."

Morales is charged with assault, but spectators corroborate her claim that she is a victim.

"He continued to push and wave his arm, which of course he's going to brush her breast, and put his elbow on her breast. She said ‘don't put your elbow on my breast, now you are sexually assaulting me,'" said Vasquez.

MTSU confirms Don McGlone, with the group "Pinpoint Evangelism," did have the appropriate permit to be on-campus Tuesday afternoon.

For his fall, McGlone was treated in the emergency room, and released and doing just fine.

Michaela Morales bonded out of the Rutherford County jail just Tuesday evening. She has a December court date for the assault charge.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) - A Middle Tennessee State University student entered a plea agreement on a charge that she assaulted an evangelist on campus last year.

The Daily News Journal reported 23-year-old Michaela Morales received nearly a year of probation, must do 24 hours of community service and pay preacher John McGlone $80 restitution.

McGlone is with PinPoint Evangelism, based in Adair County, Ky. He and others from the ministry were speaking on an outdoor knoll at MTSU on Oct. 27, 2009. A confrontation ensued after some students perceived McGlone's message as hateful.

Court records quoted MTSU Police Sgt. Misty White who said Morales pushed McGlone, who fell down a stairway and hit a trash can.

Morales claimed McGlone touched her inappropriately and that she was using force to ward him off.

It sounds like these people are coming from Far Rockaway, Queens, my old stomping grounds (1994-1997), and a place I unfortunately have to ride through a few times a year. The fat, light-skinned black guy says he’s getting off in “Five Towns,” in neighboring Nassau County. That means the bus could be the N31, N32, or Q113.

The Five Towns are Inwood, Lawrence, Woodmere, Cedarhurst and Hewlett.

Fox News announced Wednesday that actress Stacey Dash has been hired as a contributor to provide cultural analysis and commentary across the network’s daytime and prime time programming.

The news is not going over too well on the left, particularly in the black community — Dash is of African-American and Mexican descent.

“Stacey is an engaging conversationalist whose distinctive viewpoints amongst her Hollywood peers have spawned national debates,” Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine said in a statement. “We’re pleased to have her join Fox News.”

Dash, best known for her role in the 1995 movie “Clueless,” has drawn scorn from the left before, having come out in support of Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election — she was outspoken about the reaction to that decision.

“Perhaps I publicly endorsed Romney from a slightly naïve place, thinking that I could speak my voice without being criticized in such racially charged and hateful tones,” she wrote in an editorial for TMZ.

The conservative actress was in the news earlier this month when she took to Twitter in support of the movie “Moms’ Night Out,” a family comedy portraying women in conventional roles.

Wednesday’s announcement brought out more of the “racially charged hateful tones” Dash spoke of, as seen on Twitter. While many of the tweets are being deleted by users once they realize their hatred is on full display, Twitchy.com captured a few:

[I couldn't get the tweets to show, and had to instead copy and paste their respective texts.]

The great virtue of a book like The Debt, by black “activist” Randall Robinson, is that you don’t have to read it to know what it says. You can be sure it will blame all black problems on whites, living or long dead, and demand unlimited reparations. In addition — despite Ivy League credentials the author brags of — the writing will be wretched: disorganized, prolix, shot through with garbled metaphors and big words wrongly used. Indeed, The Debt is a sadly representative sample of the thought processes of the black intellectual elite.

Robinson starts with the obvious: “African Americans lag the American mainstream in virtually every area of statistical measure.” The reason for this, of course, is “American slavery and the vicious climate that followed it.” And because of “the staggering breadth of America’s crime against us ... a fortune is owed.”

Robinson particularly emphasizes “the cost of [an] obstructed view of ourselves.” “We hate ourselves. [W]e don’t know what has happened to us and no one will tell us. Thus we have concluded that the fault must be ours.” Ignorance of their glorious African ancestors holds back black children: “[A]chievement gaps cannot be fully closed until Americans — all Americans — are repaired in their views of Africa’s role in history ... blacks need to know the land of their forebears when its civilizations were verifiably equal to any in the world” — as if American children were not already overburdened with exaggerations and lies about black achievement.

Mr. Robinson’s main argument for reparations is therefore psychological. As he explains, reparations would tell blacks: “You are owed. You were caused to endure terrible things. The fault is not yours. There is nothing wrong with you.” Reparations will “heal our psyches.” Not that Mr. Robinson would turn his back on tangible compensation. He admits, as if conceding nothing: “Oh, we often like its [America’s] wealth, its abundance of commodities, its markets of endless stuff,” and insists that blacks be made whole economically. Although he coyly declines to name a sum, he asks whites to fork over the riches unjustly extracted from black labor, not only from slavery but sharecropping and capitalism itself, which “starts each child where its parents left off.” He claims that the mean net worth of college-educated whites exceeds that of college-educated blacks by $50,000, and puts the difference for blue-collar blacks and whites at $12,000. He also claims discrimination in mortgage lending costs each generation of blacks $93 billion in lost equity (The Debt has a few pages of “sources” but no footnotes, so there is no telling where these figures come from).

Because he insists that “achievement differences that correlate with race must never be tolerated,” it would cost trillions of dollars to close the gaps he complains about. On top of that, Robinson wants special (white) taxpayer-funded schools for black children and free college tuition for all poor blacks “for at least two generations.” Finally, America “must dramatically reconfigure its symbolized picture of itself, to itself. Its national parks, museums, monuments, statues, artworks must be recast in a way to include ... African Americans.” The US must also cancel all debts to African countries and offer “significant monetary compensation” for having stolen “tens of millions” of their young men.

When will white liability end? Never. “Social rights, wrongs, obligations, and responsibilities flow eternal.” And what will happen if whites don’t come across? “Those others, who fifty years from now will form the majority of America’s citizens, will be inspired to punish them for it.”

As in many similar tirades, a striking feature of The Debt is Holocaust envy. Robinson is bursting with resentment that Germany compensated Jews for a mere twelve years of suffering, while blacks endured 246 years (sometimes he says 234 years) of slavery without a penny to show for it. And Jews got to keep their culture, while blacks “had never been allowed to glimpse the complex whole of the ancient self.” Lucky, lucky Jews. He apes Jewish grievances so far as to demand the return of “Africa’s looted art treasures” — an irony, given the huge but so far unsuccessful effort by American cultural institutions to interest whites in African art.

The weaknesses of Mr. Robinson’s case are obvious. Even if whites had caused black failure, they are already paying restitution in the form of racial preferences. For 35 years blacks have gotten jobs, scholarships and college admissions they did not deserve, but Mr. Robinson hurries past affirmative action in a few sentences and then pretends it does not exist. Nor does he acknowledge the enormous transfer of resources from whites to blacks through welfare and public education — nor the white wealth destroyed by black crime. A proper balancing of the books would have blacks owing whites.

In any case, blacks do poorly economically and academically because of their impulsiveness, low IQ and high illegitimacy rates, traits almost certainly due to genetic factors, not white misdeeds. At one point Mr. Robinson himself has a glimpse of this hard truth. Recounting a trip to Cuba — he greatly admires Fidel Castro — he notes: “White Cubans still appear very much to have the better of things. They dominate political power. They are generally better off economically.” Robinson explains the persistence of inequality despite 40 years of totalitarian efforts to end it as “a bequest of the Moors,” whatever that may mean. A simpler answer is that not even dictators can suppress nature.

At one point Mr. Robinson himself has a glimpse of the hard truth about IQ.

Mr. Robinson’s nervy demands should not goad us to the other extreme of absolving whites completely. Slavery was wrong, and while blacks may have fared better as slaves in America than as slaves in Africa, a wrong that accidentally helps its victim is still a wrong. Slave owners did owe something. Still, slavery was legal in its day, and compensation could only have been extracted by unjust, ex post facto laws. Moreover, there was slavery in Africa long before it came to America, and virtually every black who crossed the Atlantic was captured and sold to whites by fellow blacks. Why not send their descendants a bill, too? However unjust slavery may have been, it ended a century and a half ago and has no current significance. It is time to bury the past.

It is worth emphasizing the full awfulness of Mr. Robinson’s writing. On poverty: “We are virtually numb now to our global position of economic bottomness. In the refuge of our subculture, we have disguised enfeebled self-images in the escapist behaviors of people who would angrily deny the massive loss of self-confidence.” On politics: “The intramural tango of bitsy Democratic palliatives and itsy-bitsy Republican palliatives does little more than divert attention and siphon energy as a recondite rot steals up inexorably from the underside, narrowing our practical freedoms and troubling our tenuous contentment. A tangle of nameless, nebulous thoughts clamor for description, while I struggle even to hear myself think in the face of the public career types with their heads vised in a thoroughly disproved orthodoxy, their voices claiming variety but in fact chiming in a tedium of pointless concern, their eyes all blinkered, and their feet long set upon the easy path.”

There are a few excellent black writers, but jumbles like this are all too typical of black intellectuals. What sort of disordered mind produces them? More urgently, how can whites — accustomed to language that communicates rather than wears down — deal with such minds? At the very least, whites must recognize that they face something fundamentally alien.

Michael Levin is Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

On Tuesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox news Channel, conservative commentator Ann Coulter weighed in on the fallout of the Veterans Administration hospitals scandals.

Coulter, author of Never Trust a Liberal Over 3-Especially a Republican, warned that scandal was a sign of things to come under ObamaCare. But she added that hasn’t been fully realized, especially by voters that will participate in this fall&rsquo;s midterm elections because of the waivers the Obama administration has issued delaying the brunt of the consequences of the law.

Partial transcript as follows:

HANNITY: Here with reaction, author, columnist Ann Coulter. To me, the vet story is at the top, and the fact that there's no sense of urgency here. But then you got the outing of a CIA agent, and which really put him and his family at risk, and you don't see the same outrage when Valerie Plame, who was not a covert agent, was outed. That angers me. You know, what could happen next, Ann Coulter?

COULTER: Well, I'm looking forward to Valerie Plame's statement of outrage on this incident, and her useless husband. Maybe she'll get so angry that she'll force him to get a job. I agree the VA -- but Democrats never care about foreign policy, as I've said many times. They consider it an irrelevancy. What they want to do is socialize everything, like health care. And you see with the VA scandal why Republicans don't want the government running everything, anything run by the government. It can be these veterans' hospitals. It can be the IRS. It can be, you know, the National Science Foundation. It will be useless, inefficient. The people who are supposed to be doing their jobs will be sitting, watching pornography.

That's how the government works, which is why we want to give as little as possible to the government to do. I mean, even the Pentagon, even the Defense Department is constantly being ripped off by scamsters. And you know, the $300 ashtray, or was it $300,000? I don't even remember. We know there's going to be waste and inefficiency. That's why you limit the federal government to doing only those things...

HANNITY: Let me ask you this...

COULTER: ... only the federal government can do. But no, we're all going to be getting the same health care the vets are getting, under "Obama care."

HANNITY: But that's the point. The obvious answer, if they had any sense of urgency, is every vet should be allowed to go to any hospital they want and get immediate care so that no other vets die because of this incompetence. But wouldn't that destroy the left narrative that they're capable of running health care? Wouldn't that put a big hole in their big argument?

COULTER: Well, yes! I mean, all these left-wing economists, including Paul Krugman, cited the VA hospital system as the model for socialized medicine and "Obama care." And isn't it going to be fantastic, and it runs so well. No, we knew it wouldn't run well. We knew it would run like the VA hospitals, anyone who knows anything about VA hospitals.

How about letting us all go to whatever doctor we want to, and how about letting us all go to whatever hospital we want, instead of destroying health insurance in America, which is what "Obama care" does? It simply -- it has -- it has -- it has made health insurance illegal, and instead, we have a welfare system that we pay for through our insurance premiums, which makes "Obama care" the most regressive tax in world history. I pay the same health care premium as Michael Bloomberg does, and he has a lot more money than I do.

At least with other programs to pay for people who can't pay for themselves, there's a general welfare program. People, you know, are taxed according to their income. There's one central program. No, here I'm going to pay for everyone else's health care and their smoking cessation programs...

HANNITY: Yes.

COULTER: ... and marital counseling and everything else through my insurance premium, which is not only astronomical, but prevents me from going to the doctor I want to and the hospital I want to! And why does this affect me and not most people watching right now? Because those waivers are working.

People are going to go to the voting booth this November without realizing that their health insurance is about to be made illegal, they will not be able to go to the doctor they want, they will not be able to go the hospitals they want. It's only the individual self-employed like myself, a few million in America, who are already subject to the provisions of "Obama care"!

HANNITY: I would actually suggest they set up a hotline for vets, or a Web site. But we know that's impossible for them to pull off. So...

COULTER: Well, also, what are you going to do, do that for the entire country? We're all going to be under government-run health care!

HANNITY: Well, I'm saying in the immediate -- in the short term, we got help the vets. But in the long term, that ought to wake up every American. If they'll do this to American vets, they'll do that to every American, which is your point!

Chris McDaniel, a Mississippi State Senator, is challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) in a June 3 primary election that will determine who’ll occupy that seat in the next three Congresses. (The Democrats have a negligible chance of winning the seat in the fall election.)…

It seems to me that Hoppe could have cut this thing off immediately, rather than go through a one-year ordeal. UNLV is a public university; hence, the school was infringing on his First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights to freedom of opinion, due process, and equality under the law. The university by-laws were moot. He seems to have approached this as one would a private university, where the Bill of Rights supposedly has no standing. Why didn’t his attorney advise him accordingly? (But what about the U.S. Constitution, otherwise? Private organizations aren’t permitted to engage in slavery, after all.)

Readers of this site probably know about my ordeal at my university, which has been covered quite extensively on this site and by the major mainstream press. Now that major combat operations have ended (to employ a phrase used by Bush in reference to Iraq...two years ago), I've had some time to reflect on what happened, why, and whether and to what extent I responded properly.

And so here are my thoughts on this incident that took my career as a professor of economics in a direction I would never have anticipated. Now that the case is more or less settled, I no longer feel bound by legal considerations to keep silent on important details. This article is the first to disclose the full details of the case.

Las Vegas prides itself for its tolerance and so does UNLV, its university. At the university, however, tolerance is selective. You may assert that white heterosexual males are responsible for all of mankind’s misery, that Castro’s Cuba is a great success story, that capitalism means exploitation, or that most university professors are liberals because conservatives are too stupid to teach. If anyone should complain about this, such complaint will be dismissed outright.

And rightly so. After all, the university is committed to academic freedom. Its faculty has the "freedom and an obligation … [to] discuss and pursue the faculty member’s subject with candor and integrity, even when the subject requires consideration of topics which may be politically, socially or scientifically controversial. … (a) faculty member…shall not be subjected to censorship or discipline by the University ... on grounds that the faculty member has expressed opinions or views which are controversial, unpopular or contrary to the attitudes of the University … or the community."

None of this applies to professors who dissent from socialist, statist, or culturally left-wing views, however, as I would find out.

In March of 2004, during a 75-minute lecture in my Money and Banking class on time preference, interest, and capital, I presented numerous examples designed to illustrate the concept of time preference (or in the terminology of the sociologist Edward Banfield of "present- and future-orientation"). As one brief example, I referred to homosexuals as a group which, because they typically do not have children, tend to have a higher degree of time preference and are more present-oriented. I also noted--as have many other scholars--that J.M Keynes, whose economic theories were the subject of some upcoming lectures, had been a homosexual and that this might be useful to know when considering his short-run economic policy recommendation and his famous dictum "in the long run we are all dead."

During my lecture no question was raised. (You can hear the same lecture, given some time later, on the Mises Media server.) However, two days later an informal complaint was filed by a student with the university’s affirmative action "commissar." The student claimed that he as a homosexual had been made to "feel bad" by my lecture. Based on this "evidence" the commissar, who, as I would find out only weeks later, was a former clergyman turned "certified" gay activist, called me at home to inform me that he would shut down my class if I continued making such remarks.

I agreed to meet the commissar in my office thinking that this would bring matters to a quick end. The student would be informed about the nature of a university and academic freedom, including his right to ask and challenge his professor. Instead, the commissar lectured me on what and how I was to teach my classes. I explained to him the difference between a professor and a bureaucrat and that he was overstepping his bounds, but to no avail. However, because the student had falsely claimed that my remarks had been about "all" homosexuals, I agreed to explain the difference between "all" and "average" statements during my next class.

In my next lecture I explained that when I say that Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans for instance this does not mean that every Italian eats more Spaghetti than every German. It means that on the average Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans.

Upon this the student filed a "formal" complaint. I had not taken his feelings seriously. He felt "hurt again"; and as he had learned from the commissar, feeling bad twice constituted a "hostile learning environment" (an offense that is not defined in the university by-laws). From then on the commissar made the student’s case his own. Every pretense of acting as a neutral mediator was abandoned, and he became a prosecutor.

In April I was ordered to appear before an administrative committee assembled by the commissar and to prove my statement. This was in clear violation of university rules: not only is there no provision for any "truth squad," but as bureaucrats the committee members were entirely unqualified for such a task.

However, I naïvely provided the requested evidence. My request to have the meeting taped was denied. During the hearing, which was conducted in a style reminiscent of the interrogations of politically suspect academics in communist countries or Nazi Germany, essentially only the commissar spoke.

My repeated request to hear witnesses was denied. One student, recommended by the complainant, was later secretly interviewed, but because her testimony contradicted what the commissar wanted to hear, it was suppressed. Furthermore, in his indictment, which I would not see until November, the commissar referred to a previous unrelated student complaint, but he suppressed the information that this complaint had been dismissed as without merit and actually resulted in an embarrassment for the university administration.

The provided evidence was brushed aside, because some of it had also allegedly appeared on anti-gay sites which I had never visited. Indeed, whatever I or anyone else said was irrelevant because the commissar had already found "proof" of my hostility in my writing.

In my book Democracy, The God That Failed I not only defend the right to discrimination as implied in the right to private property, but I also emphasize the necessity of discrimination in maintaining a free society and explain its importance as a civilizing factor. In particular, the book also contains a few sentences about the importance, under clearly stated circumstances, of discriminating against communists, democrats, and habitual advocates of alternative, non-family centered lifestyles, including homosexuals.

For instance, on p. 218, I wrote "in a covenant concluded among proprietors and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, … no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant ... such as democracy and communism." "Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."

In its proper context these statements are hardly more offensive than saying that the Catholic Church should excommunicate those violating its fundamental precepts or that a nudist colony should expel those insisting on wearing bathing suits. However, if you take the statements out of context and omit the condition: in a covenant… then they appear to advocate a violation of rights.

My praise of discrimination was part of a frontal attack against what is sometimes called left-libertarianism--against the politics that equates liberty with libertinism, multiculturalism, and so-called civil rights as opposed to existence and enforcement of private-property rights. In retaliation, to discredit me as a "fascist," a "racist," a "bigot," etc., the left-libertarian smear-bund has routinely distorted my views by quoting the above passages out of context.

The commissar discovered these "quotes"--and voila! I was found guilty as charged. (Characteristically, upon challenge the commissar proved unable--also during a second hearing six months later--to cite on which page the alleged quotes appeared.)

An indictment, recommending a letter of reprimand and forfeiture of a week’s pay, was forwarded to my dean, who neither accepted nor rejected it but sent it to the provost. After waiting for more than 5 months, the provost acted likewise.

In November, he instructed the university code officer, who had been a member of the first inquisition committee, to send me the indictment, form another committee and order me to show up for a second trial. The committee was composed of the dean of natural sciences, the associate dean of the hotel college, a biology professor and the president of the student government. The code officer served as secretary and the commissar as prosecutor. I was accompanied by a lawyer, in response to which the university also sent a lawyer. No committee member had any knowledge of economics.

My lawyer’s request to have the meeting taped or have a court reporter present was denied. After the student explained about his hurt feelings, my lawyer asked where in the code a "hostile learning environment" was defined. Neither the code officer nor the university lawyer could answer the question because no such definition exists.

I read the above quoted passages regarding academic freedom and argued that my contractually granted rights had been infringed upon. I had spoken about my subject and beyond that I was not obliged to "prove" anything. In fact, my statement was hardly "controversial" but utterly reasonable in light of my adduced evidence. I again requested students be interviewed concerning my alleged "hostility," but again the request was ignored. I offered several student letters written on my behalf, but they were not admitted as evidence.

The committee members asked few if any questions; only the dean contributed some precious gems of political correctness. The most time was taken up by the commissar. In the meantime he had gathered information about me and my prominence and come to the conclusion that if he could silence me he could silence anyone. He set out on a tirade against me that in the judgment of my lawyer would have gotten him thrown out of any regular courtroom. After ranting for almost half an hour even the university lawyer had enough and told him to "Shut up," and when he continued, the lawyer admonished the committee chair to cut him off.

Two months later, at the end of January 2005, the code officer called my lawyer to inform him that the "peer" committee had affirmed the first committee’s "hostile environment" finding and would recommend to the provost a letter of reprimand and forfeiture of my next merit increase. There might be a little room for negotiation, but if I didn’t accept the offer even more serious punishment up to termination might be in the offing. My lawyer’s request to see the report was denied.

I rejected the offer and having until then been placed under a gag order, finally started a counteroffensive. I was put in contact with the ACLU Nevada, and though our political views are poles apart, the ACLU to its eternal credit was principled enough to take on my "rightist" professor’s case. In addition, a prominent local attorney volunteered his services, and within a few days the Mises Institute’s public relations machinery began its work on my behalf.

First, the ACLU sent a "letter of demand," requesting an immediate end to the charade or the university would be taken to court, then local news stories about the case appeared, and protest letters and angry calls began to pour in to the university.

As a first result, on February 9th the provost sent me a "non-disciplinary letter of instruction"--a far cry from a reprimand and monetary punishment. But if this letter had been sent to calm the waters, the opposite occurred. The "instructions" stood in patent contradiction to the bylaws on academic freedom, as even a dimwit could recognize. Whatever academic reputation the provost might have had before, the letter made him look like an invidious fool.

A local affair escalated into a national and even international one, and a wave of protests turned into a flood. The university had a public relations disaster on its hands. Only ten days later--almost exactly one year after the affair had started--the university president, at the order of the chancellor of the entire university system, officially withdrew all charges against me.

This was a moment of great personal triumph, yet some things remain undone: the university has not apologized to me, no form of restitution has been offered for a lost year of my work, and no one has been held accountable at UNLV. To accomplish this, a trial would be necessary. While my lawyers agree that I would prevail in court, another year or two of my life would be lost. This cost is too high. The outpouring of world-wide support on my behalf and the many uplifting and heartwarming letters are my satisfaction.

I have long regarded the political correctness movement as a threat to all independent thought, and I am deeply concerned about the level of self-censorship in academia. To counteract this tendency, I have left no political taboo untouched in my teaching. I believed that America was still free enough for this to be possible, and I assumed that my relative prominence offered me some extra protection.

When I became a victim of the thought police, I was genuinely surprised, and now I am afraid that my case has had a chilling effect on less established academics. Still, it is my hope that my fight and ultimate victory, even if they can not make a timid man brave, do encourage those with a fighting spirit to take up the cudgels.

If I made one mistake, it was that I was too cooperative and waited too long to go on the offensive.

This is not a good case for liberals: The killer was an immigrant, a person of color, and the majority of his casualties resulted from attacks with a car or knife. It makes as much sense to rant about the NRA as to blame the Auto Club of America or the National Knife Collectors Association.

Rather, what we have is yet another mass murder committed by a schizophrenic—just like those of Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza….

Rodger had been seeing therapists since he was 8 years old. Just last year, his psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Sophy, prescribed him Risperidone, an anti-psychotic. But after looking up what Risperidone was for—schizophrenia—Rodger decided “it was the absolute wrong thing for me to take” and never did.

See, that’s the thing about schizophrenics—they don’t think they’re sick. They think the lava lamp that’s talking to them is sick….

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Note that the following obit is in the manner of a press release. Many of the factual claims it makes, e.g., her relations with James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, and alleged role in the so-called civil rights movement, are highly dubious, having come from “Angelou” herself, and have, to my knowledge, no independent corroboration.

A major figure in the Civil Rights Movement who worked directly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008.
By Larry McShane
Published: Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 9:35 A.M.
Updated: Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:17 A.M.New York Daily News

Maya Angelou, seen here in April, has died at the age of 86, according to a North Carolina station. (Paul Morigi/AP Images for National Portrait)

The 86-year-old icon, who survived a childhood rape that left her mute to find a voice heard around the world, was discovered by her caretaker, according to an announcement from Wake Forest University.

Angelou lived in an 18-room home on the campus, where she taught American Studies. [Whoever heard of such luxury for a faculty member, let alone one who probably hadn’t taught or done anything else in years?]

The increasingly frail Angelou was battling heart problems, and recently canceled her appearance at an event in her honor scheduled for this Friday.

The oft-lauded Angelou was set to received the “Beacon of Life Award” as part of major league baseball’s annual Civil Rights Games.

Angelou was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and repeat White House guest, reading the poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration.

The original composition was published and sold more than one million copies.

The nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, honored her in February 2011 with a Medal of Freedom — planting a kiss on her cheek inside the White House.

In her last post via Twitter, Angelou offered one parting bit of advice: “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”

The best-selling St. Louis native, during her remarkable lifetime, published more than 30 titles and received more than 50 honorary degrees.

Armstrong Williams recalls Dr. Maya Angelou interview on Boko Haram

Her breakthrough book was her best-selling 1970 memoir, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,” a work encouraged by her novelist friend James Baldwin.

The book made literary history as the first non-fiction best-seller by an African-American woman, and became the first of six autobiographical works.

She continued to break down barriers with her writing, penning the screenplay and the score for the 1972 film “Georgia, Georgia.”

She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize that same year for her poetry collection “Just Give Me a Drink of Cool Water’ fore I Diiie.”

During her extraordinary eight-plus decades of life, Angelou was often on the front lines of history and pop culture.

She was mentored by Baldwin, and mentored Oprah Winfrey. She worked for both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and befriended Nelson Mandela.

She earned an Emmy nomination for her work in “Roots,” and studied modern dance with Martha Graham.

[Postscript, Wednesday, April 26, 2017, 9:09 p.m.: Imdb.com does not list any Emmy nominations for Angelou/Johnson, neither under “Maya Angelou,” nor under “Roots.”]

The 1968 assassination of King occurred on her April 4 birthday, and she stopped celebrating the event for years afterward. Angelou would instead send flowers to King’s widow, Coretta.

Mrs. King, until her death in 2006, would in turn send flowers to Angelou.

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, the future writer grew up amid poverty and racism after a divorce relocated the child to small town Stamps, Ark., where she lived with her brother and grandmom.

Despite the hard times, Angelou long maintained that living in the Deep South also imbued her with the faith and values of the African-American family and culture.

As she wrote in her memoir, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was just seven years old. Her uncles then murdered the man in retribution.

The small girl, convinced she was to blame for the killing, stopped speaking for five years.

During that time, she became a voracious reader of writers from William Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe to W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.

The precocious talent began writing her earliest poems at age 9, and graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.

Angelou wrote about the women [sic] who convinced her to speak again in the 1986 children’s book “Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship.”

Her early adulthood was tumultuous: A single mother at 17, work in a strip club, as a waitress and a cook; running a brothel; marriage and divorce.

She was also San Francisco’s first African-American female cable-car conductor.

[So she claimed--at 14!]

Maya Angelou in 1978 (Jack Sotomayor/Getty Images)

Obama kisses Angelou, after giving her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011
"President Obama kisses Dr. [sic] Maya Angelou after presenting to her the 2010 Medal of Freedom in 2011" (TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Two narcissists: Angelou with Oprah Winfrey, for the latter's farewell show in 2011
"Maya Angelou with Oprah Winfrey during taping of 'Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacular,' in 2011" ((Charles Rex Arbogast/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

But Angelou’s artistic side soon emerged, and she landed a gig singing in San Francisco’s Purple Onion cabaret. Billie Holliday once sang a sweet lullaby to her son Guy, and gave his mom a back-handed compliment.

“You’re going to be famous,” she said. “But it won’t be for singing.”

By the mid-‘50s, Angelous was touring Europe in a production of “Porgy and Bess.” She later studied dance with Graham, and performed with Alvin Ailey.

There was even a 1957 Angelou album, “Calypso Lady.” She later captured three Grammys for her spoken word albums.

She relocated to Africa in 1960, and met Malcolm X while in Ghana. She took a job with the charismatic leader and returned to the states — and Malcolm was assassinated in Manhattan.

Her breakthrough memoir followed the dark days after the King killing in Memphis.

Baldwin brought the mourning Angelou to a party, which led to an introduction to a Random House editor. Baldwin supported her in the process, and the stunning result was “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

The book covered her life from birth to the birth of her son, Guy.

Her final autobiographical volume, “A Song Flung up to Heaven,” was published in 2002.

The writing in this DTN profile is surprisingly restrained. It cites many of Angelou/Johnson's evils, but without denouncing her. I learned a great deal from it, or so I initially thought. However, one important aspect of her life that it left out was that she is a literary fraud. According a report I read about 10 years ago, researchers sought to track down the people Angelou talked about in her first (and for all I knew, only) autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but couldn't find a single one.

I then read the controversial review black nationalist Wanda Coleman wrote (reprinted below) in 2002 of Angelou's "autobiography," A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in which Coleman maintains that Angelou's black nationalist and civil rights activism were also fictional. At this point, I'm not sure that there's anything coming out of Angelou's pen or mouth that can be believed.

The Leftist Worldview of Maya Angelou
By Discover the Networks

"A black person grows up in this country — and in many places — knowing that racism [white people] will be as familiar as salt to the tongue."

• African-American poet, novelist and playwright
• Civil rights activist who worked with both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
• Supporter of many left-wing icons and causes, including Fidel Castro, Mumia Abu-Jamal, affirmative action, and the Kyoto Protocol
• Views America as a nation rife with racism

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. At the age of eight, she was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend, an experience that had a profound psychological impact on the girl. A few years later, Angelou won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor School, but she dropped out at age 14 to take a job as a cable-car conductor. She later returned to finish high school, and gave birth to her son just a few weeks after graduation. In her late teens, Angelou spent time working as both a prostitute and madam.

In subsequent years, Angelou established a reputation as a skilled actress and dancer. In the mid to late 1950s, the Harlem Writers' Guild helped her develop her literary talents. Angelou also participated extensively in the civil-rights movement, helping Malcolm X build his Organization of African American Unity and serving as northern coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In the early 1960s, Angelou championed Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba. Her first published story appeared in the Cuban periodical Revolucion. In September 1960, she was deeply moved by the sight of Castro's exhuberantly warm public embrace of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in New York, where both men were attending a United Nations session. "The Russians were O.K.," Angelou later reminisced. "Of course, Castro never had called himself white, so he was O.K. from the git. Anyhow … as black people often said, 'Wasn't no Communist country that put my grandpappa in slavery. Wasn't no Communist lynched my poppa or raped my mamma.'"

Also in the early Sixties, Angelou supported the anti-South African apartheid movement and worked as a journalist and editor in Egypt and Ghana.

During the ensuing decades, Angelou gained enormous renown for her writing. She authored seven autobiographies—most famously, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)—as well as several collections of essays, theatrical works, and volumes of poetry. In 1993, at the request of president-elect Bill Clinton, Angelou composed an original poem, titled "On the Pulse of the Morning," which she read at Clinton's inauguration.

In 1994 the NAACP presented Angelou with the prestigious Spingarn Medal, which has been described as the "African American Nobel Prize." In 2009 Angelou was again honored by the NAACP, receiving an Image Award for her book, Letter to my Daughter.

In a 1997 interview, Angelou lamented: "A black person grows up in this country -- and in many places -- knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue." Reasoning from that premise, she lauded affirmative action and Head Start as programs that were not only "good for the country" but quite necessary—because, she said, "the playing field" had been "terribly unlevel, terribly unfair for centuries." In the same interview, Angelou was asked if she thought "our free-market system—capitalism itself—creates divisions and inequality," to which she replied: "Yes. Absolutely. Unfortunately, I can't find many other 'isms' that don't do the same thing."

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Angelou initially threw her support behind Hillary Clinton, saying: "I am inspired by Hillary Clinton's commitment and courage ... a daughter, a wife, a mother ... my girl." Angelou shifted her allegiance to Barack Obama, however, when the latter emerged as the Democratic nominee.

Four years later, Angelou passionately supported Obama's re-election bid, saying: "I think he has done a remarkable job, knowing how much he has been opposed…. Every suggestion he makes, the Republicans en masse fight against him or don't vote at all." In a campaign email she authored on Obama's behalf, Angelou stated: "[S]ince President Barack Obama's historic election, we've moved forward in courageous and beautiful ways. More students can afford college, and more families have access to affordable health insurance. Women have greater opportunities to get equal pay for equal work."

As the 2012 presidential election neared, Angelou predicted that Obama's detractors would inevitably give voice to their own inner racism: "I tell you we are going to see some nastiness, some vulgarity, I think. They'll pull the sheets off." In a 2012 interview with activist and MSNBC television host Al Sharpton, Angelou derided Obama's critics as "stupid," "thick," and "dense" people "who want to keep us polarized."

In July 2013 Angelou spoke out about the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman, a "white Hispanic" man who had shot and killed a black Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin in a high-profile 2012 altercation. Lamenting that the jury verdict showed "how far we have to go" as a nation, Angelou said that the many protests which were being held on behalf of the dead teen were reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN
By Maya Angelou
Random House: 214 pp., $23.95

While many American poets have languished, regardless of race, creed, color or excellence, the savvy and ever-seductive 74-year-old Marguerite Johnson, a.k.a. Maya Angelou, has parlayed statuesque looks and modest talents as actress-dancer-singer into a 30-year role on the literary stage that is, indeed, phenomenal. In 1993, at the behest of President Clinton, she became the second poet in U.S. history to recite an original poem at an inauguration. Few poets can spark a smidgen of the controversy generated in 2001 by Angelou's undisclosed cut of the estimated $50-million in sales for writing greeting card verse, a pursuit for which she is superbly suited. Purportedly the final installment of her serial autobiography, "A Song Flung Up to Heaven," appears only a few months after the first of her Hallmark card line and seems calculated to encompass celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, African American history month, National Women's month as well as her 74th birthday this month, National Poetry Month.

It might be assumed that Angelou would take her honorary doctoral degrees, make a graceful bow and retire from the literary round table with celebrated reputation intact. Alas, a dignified departure is not the trait of the greedy when one more traipse to the trough is offered. Once again, Angelou dips into her past to offer up an emotional repast that would starve a skeleton.

I vented my bias against celebrity autobiographies at the outset of a favorable review of Angelou's "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes" (Book Review, Aug. 13, 1986), in which I stated that I usually find them "self-aggrandizements and/or flushed-out elaborations of scanty press packets." Relieved, I summarized "Shoes" as "a thoroughly enjoyable segment from the life of a celebrity!"

No can do with "Song." "Song" is a sloppily written fake, bloated to 214 pages by large type and widely spaced chapter headings, more than half its 33 chapters averaging two to four pages.

Powers exhibited in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" have deserted her in "Song." Her titillating confessions and coquettish allusions come off as redundant and hollow old tricks. She not only engages in her usual name-dropping but shockingly makes that the book's content. Shamelessly, she cannibalizes the reputations of three major black figures: Malcolm X (Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), James Baldwin and King Jr., using them as linchpins on which to promote her specious pose as an activist.

"Song" opens with Angelou's return to the United States from Ghana in 1964, a time when she looked to plunk herself into the sociopolitical fray. She spends time in San Francisco, in Hawaii and in L.A. (west of the Harbor Freeway, where whites were the majority) before moving to New York City, living above the concerns of a new generation of angry young blacks.

With unflinching piety, she skips her days as a dancer and restyles herself as a militant, fostering the illusion that she was at the core of the civil rights and black power movements. Rather than substantiate this, Angelou plays the adolescent game of being the first to tattle on others when one is guilty: "The same people who don't give a damn now will lie and say they always supported him [Malcolm X]." Throughout "Song," Malcolm's name is a mantra as Angelou smokily extols "the importance of his life and of his death" without exposition. She has forgotten the swift reliability of the 1960s underground grapevine. Had she joined the Organization of African-American Unity (I belonged to the Compton branch), it would have been news coast to coast. The dead (including Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, who died tragically in June 1997) cannot contradict her--which may partly explain the 16-year lapse between "Shoes" and "Song."

Meanwhile, Angelou artfully plays the race card, like the muse Euterpe or Sister Flute, coochie-cooing admirers out of shirts and socks, transforming bigots into simpering ninnies and academic cowardice into five-figure honorariums.

If "Caged Bird" put Angelou at the fore of those braving fiction's devices to enhance their truths, in "Song" she regresses, making it a textbook example of the danger inherent in that technique: misinterpretation. For example, taken alone, Chapter 19 might approximate any single woman's search for work on hostile turf but, when wedded to Chapter 25, it becomes a "choose" in street parlance--straight out of novelist Iceberg Slim--making Angelou, in her 30s, seem less the ingenue ward and more the procurer when setting up her benefactor with a lady friend.

Ever age-conscious, Angelou relies on innuendo and inference to blur time, avoiding dates, locales and other details, thus muddling events, as in "Caged Bird" when recounting the excitement generated by a Joe Louis fight. Angelou scrambles Louis' June 25, 1935 bout with Primo Carnera (she was 7) with his June 22 championship bout with Max Schmeling three years later. Likewise, in Chapter 9 of "Song," the book's lengthiest, Angelou bizarrely mangles the Watts riots of August 1965. After exclaiming "the cry of 'burn baby burn' was loud in the land" in 1964 (the phrase was the signature of KGFJ disc jockey Magnificent Montague, unheard nationwide until after the riots), she patronizingly defends residents with whom she is unable to identify, tiptoeing down to Watts to see the devastation.

In writing that is bad to God-awful, "Song" is a tell-all that tells nothing in empty phrases and sweeping generalities. Dead metaphors ("sobbing embrace," "my heart fell in my chest") and clumsy similes ("like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time") are indulged. Twice-told crises (being molested, her son's auto accident) are milked for residual drama.

Extravagant statements come without explication, and schmooze substitutes for action. Her most intriguing character, "The African," is underdeveloped. She softly decries racism in between snipes at those who marginally offended her during her "rise" (Eldridge Cleaver, a white woman at a party). Tiresomely, she repeats her mother's homilies when not issuing her own. There is too much coulda shoulda woulda.

Unfortunately, the Maya Angelou of "A Song Flung Up to Heaven" seems small and inauthentic, without ideas, wisdom or vision. Something is being flung up to heaven all right, but it isn't a song.

* * *
From 'A Song Flung Up to Heaven'

Rosa and Dolly and I traveled to Stockton to spend a last weekend with my mother before returning to New York.

She cooked and laughed and drank and told stories and generally pranced around her pretty house, proud of me, proud of herself, proud of Dolly and Rosa.

She said black women are so special. Few men of any color and even fewer white women can deal with how fabulous we are.

'Girls, I'm proud of you.'

In the early morning, I took my yellow pad and ballpoint pen and sat down at my mother's kitchen table.

I thought about black women and wondered how we got to be the way we were. In our country, white men were always in superior positions; after them came white women, then black men, then black women, who were historically on the bottom stratum.

How did it happen that we could nurse a nation of strangers, be maids to multitudes of people who scorned us, and still walk with some majesty and stand with a degree of pride?

I thought of human beings, as far back as I had read, of our deeds and didoes.

According to some scientists, we were born to forever crawl in swamps, but for some not yet explained reason, we decided to stand erect and, despite gravity's pull and push, to remain standing. We, carnivorous beings, decided not to eat our brothers and sisters but to try to respect them. And further, to try to love them.

And some naturally bellicose creatures decided to lay down our swords and shields and to try to study war no more.

Some of us heard the singing of angels, harmonies in a heavenly choir, or at least the music of the spheres.

We had come so far from where we started, and weren't nearly approaching where we had to be, but we were on the road to becoming better.

I thought if I wrote a book, I would have to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Rise out of physical pain and the psychological cruelties.

Rise from being victims of rape and abuse and abandonment to the determination to be no victim of any kind.

Rise and be prepared to move on and ever on.

I remembered a children's poem from my mute days in Arkansas that seemed to say however low you perceive me now, I am headed for higher ground.

I wrote the first line in the book, which would become "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Hey Steve, can you let Nicholas Stix know that his recent VDare article is inaccurate?

He claims that in the video the black guy says “My Homies Die, and White Guys Die” but that is not what he said. The news report got it right when they reported that he said "My homies die so everybody gotta die".

Not to mention the guy he killed was also black, so it makes no sense.

We don't need to use sensationalism to plead our case, it's good enough already.

That’s particularly important because the Treason Lobby is currently gloating about some recent GOP congressional primaries won by Establishment candidates.

But these were pyrrhic victories, achieved by exceptional expenditure and fatal rhetorical concessions. And, in contrast, these European elections show that, if an Establishment systematically frustrates its base on immigration and National Question issues, eventually the base bites back.

That’s great news. Also great news: the amazing continued stand-off over what the Treason Lobby calls “Immigration Reform” and what VDARE.com calls, more truthfully, the “Amnesty/ Immigration Surge.”

This legislation has been hanging over America like a breaking wave since the 113th Congress began in early 2013. But it has not yet swept America away, despite the Treason Lobby’s repeated lying predictions. There is only reason for this: not Inside-the-Beltway lobbying—but intense Outside-The-Beltway grass-roots opposition.

VDARE.com has a grass-roots strategy. We make facts and arguments available to American patriots for free. We are delighted to see them surface in Town Halls and on the comment threads. But we need your help to do it.

The bad news, of course: the Treason Lobby, having given up hope of persuading America to accept an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, now hopes to slip it through by unscrupulous parliamentary maneuver, either after the last GOP primaries but before the summer, or in the Lame Duck session after the November elections.

But at VDARE.com we believe the Treason Lobby can be stopped—the breaking wave can be held suspended—with your help.

We are committed to VDARE.com and will not close it, although we may have to slow our pace of posting to get through our annual summer squeeze.

About Me

I am a dissident journalist, whose work has been published in dozens of daily newspapers, magazines, and journals in English, German, and Swedish, under my own name and many pseudonyms. While living in internal exile in New York, where I am whitelisted, I maintain NSU/The Wyatt Earp Journalism Bureau and some eight other blogs (some are distinctive but occasional venues, while others are mirrors), and also write for stout-hearted men such as Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor. Please hit the “Donate” button on your way out. Thanks, in advance.
Follow my tweets at @NicholasStix.

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